When conflicts heat up, calling someone selfish or threatening them feels righteous but backfires. You can set boundaries without blame. The speaker explains why these moves escalate disputes and what works better.
Do you want to ruin a relationship real fast? Just start calling the other party selfish. Just take that position, assume it, believe it, scream at them. Yeah, that behavior is not good. So you can set boundaries. But at the end of the day, if I'm going to make that person wrong and I'm going to threaten that person, that's two great strategies to escalate the problem. If you make the person wrong and you make threats, if that is your go to default, that is the double sided coin that wrecks the relationship, destroys the negotiation, kills it all. You feel righteous, you feel offended, so you speak out that they are wrong, they are selfish and you make a threat. That's what kids do. And so if you never learned other skill sets than that, then that's what we have to talk about. It might feel good in the moment, but it actually makes the situation worse.
